“You have a Substack going?”
Wherein I stop lurking and start posting
This was a reply from another creator slash mother slash inhabiter of myriad roles that I met at the children’s library near my home. Her question was in response to my comment on her IG prompt What dream have you been putting off? I don’t typically respond to calls to collect and mine longing as a means to motivate one another into taking action, but I was feeling uncharacteristically down that day.
I thought it appropriate to begin my first post here (article? Stack?) with an example of how I’ve been interacting with art after the twin towers of the global pandemic and parenthood shifted my world in ‘20 and ‘21. Most of my interactions with the writers, actors, podcasters, comedians, and musicians I love occur online. That wasn’t the case before March 2020. Ya girl was famously OUTSIDE and chatting up strangers.
On occasion, I can negotiate a night with my beloved wherein he does dinner & bedtime while I slink off to a play, a reading, or a meetup with friends old and new. The majority of fresh faces in my social circle have arrived through the neighborhood moms’ group chat. It is a balm and a blessing in the purest sense. It does take a village, it turns out. I’ve discovered that sometimes a proverb is passed on through space and time for real and nurturing reasons and not just because, for example, someone is trying to overpower an entire race of people.
My husband is extremely capable of caring for his own brood solo (unlike the thousands of fathers on Reddit, if my mommy subreddits ring true) and is supportive of my writing and need to go touch grass (I am the extrovert of our dynamic.) It’s me who must override my own id and remind myself that “mom guilt” is a patriarchal fabrication and does not serve my higher purpose. My children have two sane, loving, safe, and vigilant parents. One of them can leave the nest for a few hours when they’re both unconscious to chase the lightning of metropolitan life that inspired said parent to drive from Dallas to Brooklyn nearly 15 years ago.
I’ve lived alone in cheaper cities and I’ve worked from home off and on for the past decade. Being outside always invigorates me creatively. The world is my room of one’s own, in this way. I can become laser focused when writing in a bar, in a subway car, on a plane, at a park or on the beach. I am the Lorax; I write with the trees.
I joined Substack back when Twitter started consistently failing to fulfill my primary reason for being there; to learn about The Publishing Industry™️ and to be in community with other writers. Never knowing what MFA meant while I was actively accruing student loan debt to satisfy my curiosity about human origins and culture after reprogramming myself from a diet of JW (Jehovah’s Witness) nonsense via a degree in Cultural Anthropology (lol), I had to use my autodidactic brain to train myself as a Real Author might. In short, I had to get it out the mud. I went to the Twitter Academy for Millennial Female Writers. I believe it paid off, to a point.
Twitter allowed me to talk at, if not with, my living literary idols. There, I could type Open to Queries in the search bar and scroll through pages of agents posting their MSWLs and industry tips. I could find contest deadlines to chase and learn words like slushpile and comps. I discovered Cave Canem and joined two book clubs. When Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison died, Twitter was the first place I ran to participate in public mourning rituals, find beautiful, rare photos of them, and learn long since buried lore about their personal and professional lives.
I recently experienced one of those hangovers that both purges and bring clarity, like a forest fire catching on my tender insides. Why was I choosing to drink away the blues of my waking work life rather than say, imbibing to conjure up and capture a muse? Which I’m historically terrible at. I write only when the words start to repeat themselves over and over again inside my head. Until they are so loud I cannot do anything else but write or type them away. Rarely have I been able to say now I will sit down to write a thing and have done so. And any writing practice I’ve started has gone dead on the vine.
The ache in my guts and dry taste in my throat were trying to communicate something to me beyond don’t mix your alcohol and you’re too old for this you dizzy bitch. If I was going to work myself into a week of sad/mad, it should be because I got another rejection email and not because I was rushing towards some made up deadline at work. Let my work life balance (vomit) tilt towards my art for once.
I started writing creatively in the 3rd grade. After moving to a new country ass town and starting at a new school half way through the year, I decided to form a poetry club. I then convinced maybe five or so other girls to write poems and read them aloud during centers time. This was a 30 minute block of free, unstructured playtime and I got those elementary broads to spend it rhyming words and trying on big emotions that most of us had likely never felt before. The audacity!
I have always been in community with writers and lovers of the written word. That is my North Star. And when that community moves, I go with it.
So I created this account on Substack to bear witness in another sense. I wanted to read the more intimate thoughts of the authors of the books I’ve consumed and recommended to friends. I wanted to further my education and stumble upon any tricks of the trade my agented peers could float down my way.
I thought, perhaps one day I’ll write something beyond a comment once I’ve been here long enough to figure out how and why. It’s becoming more clear to me that the how can be through an inexhaustible multitude of formats. The content I folllow here serves many functions. This space can exist as my Livejournal (RIP), or my display of worthiness wherein I hook my next literary agent (hello there), or an avenue to vent my rage in a productive way. Or figure out why rage in a woman must be productive at all, why we aren’t afforded the privilege to be angry without it having to mean something. I’m still tangling with what this will be called or for whom I’m writing or how frequently I may post here before jumping ship to yet another platform.
In the meantime, I’ll just start with the bio I’m currently using in my query letters for my first novel, 12 Lone Wolves, a southern rooted revenge thriller starring a pissed off Black woman. Feel free to provide feedback, I’m open to any and all writing advice:
I am a born and bred Texan who moved to Brooklyn in search of larger creative communities. I'm a former podcaster and writer whose work has appeared in Outlook Springs, MadSwirl, A Very Feminist Zine by Las Odiosas, The Heart Podcast, The Love Like Salt Anthology, RaceBaitR, Feministing, We the Women Collective, Cid Pearlman's (home)body, The Chachalaca Review, and Auger Magazine. My debut poetry and short story collection, FFing, was published by Desperanto Press in 2010. I’m a Cave Canem workshop alum, and my work has been featured in readings across the DFW Metroplex, NYC, and London. When I'm not running around after my kids, I'm usually curled up on the couch reading or looking for local art of any genre to experience.
Beautiful writing. You have a new fan in me ✨ Also ummmm your book 12 Lone Wolves sounds bomb!!!!